Willard Hucks

Principal Engineer, Enterprise Systems Engineering · Nike, Inc.

Nov 2021 – Present · Beaverton, OR

• Set enterprise direction for applied AI practices: model selection, retrieval strategy, evaluation and experimentation, MLOps, and responsible AI and model governance for production use.
• Architected a schema-as-guardrails platform that lets citizen developers generate code to company specification safely, enforcing secure tool and data access through approved containers, platforms, and reusable patterns rather than one-off solutions.
• Designed MCP-based developer tooling (a symbol-index server) that reduced code analysis costs by ~70% by feeding models precise, governed context instead of bulk source.
• Maintained and operated internally-hosted LLM inference infrastructure (vLLM) at enterprise scale, serving internal chat and code-generation workloads.
• Built the framework for enterprise Microsoft Copilot adoption, including Copilot Cowork and Copilot Studio.
• Multiplied teams through architecture reviews, reusable patterns, and mentorship across engineering organizations.

Senior Engineering Manager · Nike, Inc.

Mar 2018 – Nov 2021 · Beaverton, OR

• Led the Release Engineering Core team (6 developers, systems engineers, and architects) and its Agile process; owned the global retail release platform.
• Spearheaded quality efforts for high-demand ("high-heat") sneaker releases; founded an internal engineer training initiative to grow team capability.

Lead DevOps Engineer · Nike, Inc.

Apr 2017 – Mar 2018 · Beaverton, OR

• Architected a containerized, cloud-provider-agnostic global release management platform (Azure, AWS, and datacenter deployments) and handed it off cleanly to the owning team.
• Designed a global package distribution system that cut deployment time from 9 days to 1 hour, removing an infrastructure bottleneck and raising release velocity.

DevOps Engineer · Nike, Inc.

Aug 2015 – Apr 2017 · Beaverton, OR

• Designed a global retail testing methodology (Ansible + Nutanix) that reduced lab creation from 1 week to 1 hour and release testing from two weeks to under one business day.
• Used infrastructure-as-code to guarantee test-environment integrity; helped other teams automate daily work with Ansible and Python.

Service Virtualization Engineer · Nike, Inc.

Jan 2015 – Aug 2015 · Beaverton, OR

• Built company-wide CA Service Virtualization training and processes, eliminating ~$1M/month in infrastructure spend.

Systems Administrator · Performance Health Technology

Mar 2014 – Jan 2015 · Salem, OR

• Maintained the company datacenter (Nutanix Acropolis, Meraki networking, Nagios) and mentored junior administrators and developers.

Helpdesk Manager · Allegheny Technologies Incorporated

Oct 2012 – Mar 2014 · Albany, OR

• Supported 2,000+ end users across 5 remote sites; built and deployed systems; mentored technicians and interns.

Armory Chief · United States Marine Corps

Jan 2009 – Oct 2012 · Jacksonville, NC

• Accountable for $19M in weaponry and electronics; developed and delivered training to 40,000+ Marines; mentored 15 junior Marines into leadership roles.

Synaptic Drift: governed context retrieval for LLM agents

open source · in active development

github.com/trydydd/synaptic-drift

• Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system serving verifiable, governed context to agents over MCP with schema-enforced tool contracts; ~80% token reduction on documentation/context retrieval in testing to date.
• Validated by end-to-end task success: building working functionality against live, unseen library docs using a 9B model, so retrieval quality couldn't be masked by model capability. Sub-21ms P95; cryptographic content verification and lifecycle governance.

Vamp: schema-as-guardrails platform for citizen developers

personal · in active development

• Lets citizen developers write and ship code to company specification safely, enforcing secure tool and data access through schema-defined guardrails instead of manual review.

Cofounder

Oak Swale Acres

2018 – Present

instagram.com/oakswaleacres

• Family farm investing in community food security; raise livestock and donate 300–400 lbs of meat annually to local food pantries and individuals in need.

Founder

Slime Mold Grappling Club

2023 – Present

slimemoldgrappling.com

• Publish free, structured submission-grappling curriculum and coaching resources; donate equipment and consultation to clubs that don't charge dues.